Welcome to the 16th issue of Software Testing Weekly!

After months of waiting, the amazing State of Testing 2020 report has finally been published! Although each page is already well analysed, I want to add my two cents.

One visible trend is that testers are performing testing activities less often (page 6). "It's bad!" — you may say. But not necessarily. As you can see in the further parts of the report, growing automation (page 27) is helping us be more efficient in testing. At the same time, we delegate more testing to others (page 23). All that gives us, testers, more time to expand our roles into other areas.

What worries me, however, is the downward trend of testers with 0-2 years of experience (page 7). Does it mean we have less new testers year after year? I'm afraid so. But I believe we can revert this trend and this is partially my job now.

PS. Massive thanks to PractiTest and Tea-Time with Testers for organising the survey and putting together the results.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Dawid Dylowicz  

What is quality?

A question asked and answered thousands of times, and yet, not enough. This is because there is no universal answer, as Lina Zubyte explains and it all depends on your context.

qualitybits.tech  

My Complete Guide to SDET Interviews

A great piece of advice from Lauren Christianson on SDET interviews. Whether you're a manager looking to give an SDET job or an engineer trying to get one, this is a must-read!

PS. It's a premium article on Medium, so if you can't access it, simply open the link in a private tab.

medium.com  

Think twice before you join a startup as a software tester/QA engineer

I've spent most of my career working in startups and I loved how versatile type of job that was and how I could grow thanks to that. However, every type of company has its pros and cons, which Raj Navakoti describes in great detail, giving a fine overview of the possible QA career paths in startups and bigger companies.

medium.com  

Tester’s Credibility – The struggles of a QA during the lockdown

Many of us switched to working from home and some might be looking for new remote opportunities. I liked Dwane Debono's piece of advice on how to build credibility as a QA when there's no face-to-face communication.

testautonation.com  

Selenium cheat sheet — a comprehensive list of Selenium commands

This is huge — everything you will ever need from Selenium in one place by Madhan Kumaravelu. Big thanks for that!

github.com  

Who should write end-to-end tests? Developers, QA or both?

A very good question that most of the modern teams should ask themselves — greatly explained on many levels by Spyros Argalias. Kudos!

sargalias.com  

Writing Resilient End-to-End Tests

Regardless of who writes the test, resilience is the writer's responsibility. Here comes Jake Marsh sharing practical advice on how to make end-to-end tests more stable, using Puppeteer as an example. Handy code snippets included!

dev.to  

Reconsider the Android emulator for faster testing

Running tests on Android emulator, whether locally or on CI, has always been a daunting task. Luckily, Google worked on it recently and it seems most of the pains are gone, as Doug Stevenson explains in more detail providing with some useful tips.

medium.com  

Performance testing types

If you want to easily tell the difference between load, stress, spike and endurance types of performance testing, here you go! Kim Knup clearly explained everything using visuals and short descriptions.

wordpress.com  

Load Testing Your API with Postman

Postman is such a versatile API tool that you can use for functional testing as well as performance testing (as mentioned a few weeks ago). Here's yet another use case explained by Mostafa Moradian who demonstrates how to use existing Postman collections for load testing using open-source k6 tool.

k6.io  

Book Review: Software Engineering At Google

Oleksandr Romanov describes and gives a review of just-published Software Engineering at Google book. Actually, I might get a copy!

github.io  

Only two bugs left... 😂